Talk:James Byrnes
I suddenly couldn't remember whether Byrnes had ever appeared in HT's work. HT's done way too many WWII stories to overlook him entirely, but I'm surprised he's only got the one appearance. Herb Druce's wartime job definitely sounds like something Byrnes would cook up, and depending on how inclined one is to overlook or vilify his anti-integration stance, he's the sort of figure you would have expected to crop up in TL-191 as either an opposition leader or one of Featherston's henchmen. Turtle Fan (talk) 02:34, September 2, 2014 (UTC) :He would have made a lot more sense as Featherston's Sec of State than George Herbert Walker did. TR (talk) 22:34, September 3, 2014 (UTC) ::Got that right. ::When Roosevelt made his peace with the fact that the DNC was not going to renominate that kooky Wallace as VP, he pushed hard for Byrnes to join the ticket in his place. The DNC shot that down too because Byrnes had a number of liabilities that didn't play well with some of the party's core constituencies, but the conventional wisdom at the time was that Byrnes was the natural choice even so. I wonder if a President Byrnes AH would lead to anything interesting? Turtle Fan (talk) 04:06, September 4, 2014 (UTC) :::Conroy very faintly toys with the idea in Himmler's War. When FDR realizes that Germany is now fighting with some competence now that Hitler is dead, and that the USSR is bailing on the war (and that Stalin has snookered him), he has a stroke a week or two before the 1944 election. He lives to be re-elected, but in the interim, a small little cabal composed of Byrnes and Marshall quietly lead the country, and only begrudgingly let Wallace and Truman in on things after the election. TR (talk) 15:05, September 4, 2014 (UTC) ::::That's grim. How do Byrnes and Marshall do? I'd imagine they'd both be pretty competent. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:40, September 4, 2014 (UTC) :::::Basically. They mostly just keep Acting President Wallace out the loop when it comes to prosecuting the war, until Truman and Wallace confront them. They don't impose a dictatorship or anything that dramatic. TR (talk) 19:39, September 4, 2014 (UTC) ::::::No, I wouldn't expect them to. Marshall was a gentleman of the old school. As for Byrnes, the only thing that was at all odious about him was his defense of segregation, and strange as it sounds I'd say he was pretty moderate about it, by segregationist standards anyway. As governor he increased and redistributed education funding so that the black school systems were able to come pretty close to matching the white school systems' per pupil spending, and his arguments against integration were based on federalism and the perception that Democrats were taking the Solid South for granted. Now I'm not so naive to take a South Carolina statesman at his word that, when he cries states' rights in order to defend a position with racial implications, that his sole interest is in federalism in the abstract; but at worst, Byrnes had the decency to conceal his racism beneath more legitimate political concerns, unlike his more hateful contemporaries. ::::::So Wallace was Acting President, huh? This timeline would predate the Presidential Succession Act; did they ignore the precedent that had been in place ever since Tyler stared down his Congressional enemies and equated "the duties of the President" with the office of same? Turtle Fan (talk) 02:45, September 5, 2014 (UTC) ::::::No, FDR doesn't die until a few weeks after he's inaugurated in 1945. Between the initial stroke and his death, FDR is usually hospitalized but alive, so Wallace remains Acting President, and then Truman becomes Acting President after the inauguration, and then POTUS proper. ::::::It was frustrating because Conroy got that whole mess of details right (as far as I know), but then did stupid things like the Germans building the first A-bomb in 1944 and using it in Moscow (the German a-bomb project, such as it was, was DOA in 1942), and describing Stalin's schemes for global revolution (a defining trait of Stalinism is one-state revolution; Trotsky wanted to export revolution), and Truman's giddy response to the prospect of A-bombing the Japanese (in OTL, he spent some time agonizing over its use before giving the go ahead, and that was without a terrible example like the destruction of Moscow). TR (talk) 16:39, September 5, 2014 (UTC) :::::::I know Conroy only by reputation, but that sort of thing sounds very much in his line. That being said, while Stalin didn't want to create foreign revolutions ex nihilo, he was very eager to exert influence over communist movements where they already existed, and one of the best ways to do that (as we saw through Chaim Weinberg's eyes in the recently completed TWTPE) was to pour massive resources into heretofore impoverished movements that would then become dependent on Soviet aid. He played that game from Spain to Korea, neither of which (and there are many other examples as well, of course) would have been in any serious danger of a communist takeover if the local commies had been left to their own devices. That's not the same as exporting revolution, not by a long shot, but someone with a poor grasp of history (again going by Conroy's negative reputation) might be expected to confuse the one with the other. There's no excuse for giving the Germans an A-bomb in 1944, but if they had one and had used it that would very likely push Truman to drop his without the hand-wringing, terrible example or no. You definitely don't want to be without an A-bomb in a world where the Nazis have one of their own. I'd expect some relief on Truman's part that the US had closed that all-important gap. But giddiness, no. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:54, September 5, 2014 (UTC) Speaking of Hateful So I've been using Google to try to learn a bit more about Byrnes in general, now that my interest is peaked. There's a site called reformation.org which I discovered some years ago in the course of some Wiki work: It's the source of our picture of Ferdinand II of Aragon, or was at one point, and it's the only site on which I could find a proper portrait of Al Smith rather than the ubiquitous action shot that we wound up using. (When one picture is that well known, to the exclusion of all others, it's the one we should use for our purposes.) It's a rather unpleasant and obnoxious site given over to promoting hatred of Catholics. It's filled with paranoid fantasies of Catholic conspiracies throughout history. For instance, the Ferdinand picture appeared in an otherwise worthless tract about how the Pope promoted the idea that Columbus was the first European to reach the New World when it was actually John Cabot. (Columbus confined his early expeditions to the Caribbean, Cabot was the first European explorer to chart the North American mainland.) But the Pope declared Columbus the discoverer of America and encouraged Spain to colonize the New World quickly. (This is of course only half true, Alexander VI mediated a dispute between Spain and Portugal at the request of both kings by drawing a line of demarcation.) He ignored the much stronger English claim because he didn't want the New World colonized by the Protestant English. Except of course that Cabot was as Catholic as Columbus, Henry VII was as Catholic as Ferdinand and Isabella, and Cabot's expedition predated the English Reformation by 35 years. :My head hurts from all the wrong. The Orwellian quality of "England has always been Protestant", for example...I just don't know what to say....TR (talk) 16:39, September 5, 2014 (UTC) ::You know, now that I think of it, given how HT has English-Atlantean colonists ignoring the Reformation for a while (something that I found had the ring of truth to it) I'm almost tempted to wonder whether Rome would have been better off encouraging English colonization in the sixteenth century. Then I wake up and realize that, if England had had both the will and the means to colonize that early, it would have done so no matter what the Pope felt (which probably wouldn't have been much of anything as long as England confined its colonies to sites well north of Spanish ones, something which military concerns would have demanded anyway). And yeah, that's a big ol' mound of steaming horseshit no matter how you slice it. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:54, September 5, 2014 (UTC) With Smith they're even wackier: Apparently he had a secret treaty in place with Pius XI that called on the US to go to war with Italy upon Pius's abrogation of the Lateran Treaty and occupy the Papal States. Smith's defeat ended this scheme and Pius was so angry that he caused the Great Depression in order to disgrace Hoover, then encouraged Hitler to seize control of and rearm Germany so that the Vatican could wage a proxy war against the US. :This, oddly, is less mindblowing for me, since it's a more "conventional" conspiracy theory. It takes a few things that happened (Hoover wins, the Depression, Hitler), makes up a few other things (the Smith-Pius Pact of Steel), then completely ignores all the logical inconsistencies of the theory (the Lateran Treaty came in 1929, so Pius scheming with Smith to abrogate it in 1928 makes no sense) in favor of villainizing some party or parties (Catholicism). I'm sure if we asked the people who run the site just how it was that Pius and Smith were plotting to abrogate a treaty that didn't even exist yet, we'd be assured that Pius and Catholics have amazing powers of foresight that they use only for evil, but that at the same time, they're so evil, they can't imagine they're schemes going awry, such as Hoover winning the election, TR (talk) 16:39, September 5, 2014 (UTC) ::The Smith/Pius thing appeared to be their feature presentation. I'd imagine that that got all the proper conspiracy theory polish, while the others were just unedited rantings of some drooling troglodyte. ::Looking at the two "theories" side by side, the first thing that struck me was, If you want to implicate Alexander VI in a paranoid fantasy, you can expect at least a perfunctory hearing, because he was a schemer through and through; but attributing such things to the mild-as-milk Pius XI won't pass the laugh test. Prior to his election to the papacy, the guy's claim to fame was as a librarian! ::By the way, Smith's side of the deal was going to be appointment to the College of Cardinals--something so far from his professional and personal interests that I'm not even going to comment. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:54, September 5, 2014 (UTC) So when I saw that Byrnes had an article in this lunatic asylum I was intrigued. He was born and raised Catholic but converted to the Episcopalian Church as an adult, so I thought they'd be pleased. Apparently in recent years they've gone from bigotry to a more general form of loopiness, because they didn't mention religion at all. They claimed Byrnes manipulated the DNC into ignoring Roosevelt in order to doom Wallace and nominate Byrnes instead. Pay no heed to the fact that Byrnes did not win the nomination or inherit the presidency. Some scheme. Also, they raise a fuss about how he was the originator of the practice of taking deductions from a paycheck. I don't know whether that's true or not, but if they're making hay about that I'm guessing somewhere along the way they formed an alliance with those Ron Paul weirdos. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:17, September 5, 2014 (UTC) :Again, the uber-competent villain until history gets in the way, and then they become buffoonish villains in a melodrama. (If they are of the Paulite crowd, then Wallace and Byrnes should be equally evil, albeit for different reasons.) TR (talk) 16:39, September 5, 2014 (UTC) ::Maybe not then. I didn't read the whole thing too in-depth, because my tolerance for bullshit isn't that high, but they seemed to think leaving Wallace on the ticket and allowing him to inherit the presidency would have been the best thing ever. Maybe they figured it would be a victory for loopy goofballs who don't know their own minds everywhere? That's not a group that usually goes in for much in the way of solidarity. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:54, September 5, 2014 (UTC)